“If we don’t have healthy staff, we don’t have beds.” A pediatrician reports from her hospital in South Texas, which is short on suture kits, suction cannulae, and, mostly, staff.
is contradictory among studies.) After surgery, kids move from the operating room to a recovery room; if they get stuck there waiting for a hospital bed to open, the next surgery can be delayed. With the I.C.U. full, we stretch resources taking care of I.C.U.-level children in a step-down unit. Our worries about these kids—that something bad will happen, that we will miss something or hurt them—affect us all.
The girl is sleeping in her mother’s arms. “She hasn’t been screened yet,” Teb says, and we pause. All kids who are admitted to the hospital get a screening test for, but usually just before they come upstairs. Arfa and Melanie are in surgical masks. I am in an N95 that I brought from home. Teb has a hospital N95—at this point in the pandemic, our hospital seems to have enough. Our patient isn’t in isolation and has no respiratory complaints. We go in.
When the little girl calms, she opens her eyes to peer at us past dark, teary lashes. She is startlingly beautiful, so much that we are all silent for a moment. “She’s beautiful,” Teb says. Arfa turns to the father and mother—Just now, our hospital is short on suture kits, suction cannulae, and occasionally other items.
Pam sometimes spends part of her mornings sending messages to every staff member who is not in the hospital at the moment, begging for their time. If they can come for any time at all—a whole shift, or even just two hours—she will take them. The calls keep coming in from outside hospitals: a baby withand pneumonia, a kid with chronic kidney disease and a fever, a toddler who swallowed a battery and needs a pediatric G.I. specialist to pluck it out before it erodes through her gut.
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